Tata Nano, other Indian cars fail crash tests: safety body

NEW DELHI (AFP) - The Tata Nano, billed as the world's cheapest car, and a host of other top-selling small models from India have failed their first independent crash tests, a global safety group said Friday.

The five entry-level vehicles - including the country's best-selling small car the Suzuki-Maruti Alto 800, as well as the Ford Figo, the Hyundai i10 and the Volkswagen Polo - scored no stars out of five for protection.

The tests, carried out by the New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP), saw the basic models, all without airbags, driven at 64 kilometres an hour into a block simulating a head-on collision.

The secretary general of Global NCAP called them "gratuitously dangerous" and blamed lax regulation which created an incentive to make cheap but structurally unsound vehicles for India's accident-prone roads.